


I Fear No Darkness (For you are with me)

by Sassaphrass



Series: I hold with those who Favour Fire [1]
Category: Dominion (TV)
Genre: (Or the other kind if you want), Angst, Brotherly Love, But they've been drifting apart a long long time, Gen, Introspection, Loneliness, Michael Remembers, Michael and Gabriel are twins and miss each other, Michael's POV, Particularly the Flood, Sadness, Spoilers for Season 1, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-03-10 21:18:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3303833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sassaphrass/pseuds/Sassaphrass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Made in the same momen Michael and his twin were once so close that neither knew where one started and the other began. </p><p>That was many millennia ago now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Fear No Darkness (For you are with me)

Michael had always liked the beginning of the humans' holy book:

 

“ _In the beginning there was the word and the word was god.”_

 

He'd always liked the phrase, liked the way it felt on his tongue as his mouth formed the words.

 

It's not how he remembers the beginning, of course, but it does have a poetry he can appreciate.

 

For him, in the beginning there had been Gabriel and there had been darkness, in that order.

 

When the archangel had come into being he had been aware of Gabriel almost before he was aware of himself. In the split second (though Michael supposes that this was before there were seconds or minutes or hours or years), after he had come into being, and felt himself and his brother, he had been terrified. To be made from nothing, to be nothing and then to blink into existence fully conscious and knowing so much is terrifying. He was so afraid, and almost before he realized he was afraid, or what it was to be afraid, he felt Gabriel's essence reach out to his own and he had been comforted.

 

In the beginning there was Gabriel, and there was darkness, and then Gabriel made the darkness not matter anymore.

 

The humans wonder whether Michael is capable of love, and he doesn't truly know himself. He knows he feels something that is in many ways like love, but it is more than an emotion- it is who he is. It is what he is.

 

The love he feels, such as it is, seems completely unlike the love that humans feel.

 

His love, for lack of a better word (human speech is limiting, speech of any kind is limiting) for Gabriel and his father is absolute, all encompassing, unbending, unbreakable and unchosen.

 

His father could torture him to death, as Louis had been, tormented and broken to the point that nothing could be saved Michael would smile and thank him for it.

 

And, no matter what Gabriel does to him, to other angels, to humanity, to the planet. His love for his brother will never waver, will burn as fiercely and as absolutely as when he awoke in the darkness and was not alone, and because he was not alone knew he'd never need fear the darkness.

 

Despite coming into being together at precisely the same moment, Michael had always been the little brother. Their entire existence had echoed those first few moments. Gabriel looked after Michael.

 

Michael was, in many ways, the most unruly of the archangels. His emotions existed in the extremes: outbursts of terrible rage, incandescent joy, or deep dark sorrows. He knows that to the humans he seems cold, aloof and unfeeling, but as far as angels go he'd always been wilder than most.

 

So Michael, blinded by whatever emotion had taken hold of him, acted and Gabriel had always reacted to smooth things over, balm the wound, lighten the darkness, dim that which was bright enough to blind.

 

In those days they were not quite seperate beings, but bled into one another, not unlike those rare human twins who became entwined in the womb to the point where no one could know where one began and the other ended, and who were born and lived sharing hearts, or lungs or livers. For Michael and his twin it had never been there bodies thus entwined but their minds, and their souls.

 

And then had come the Flood, and Michael's rage and hateful joy had burned too brightly for even Gabriel to dim or soothe. He had bathed himself in blood and gore and Gabriel could not temper him with words or council or the quiet influence of the place in Michael's heart where his feelings were not his own.

 

So, Gabriel had gone to Uriel and together they had left Michael broken and bleeding on the sands of Babylon. (Gabriel had needed Uriel because it was an unspoken fact that for all Michael was the little brother, the one who needed protecting, he was also the strongest in battle).

 

And lying, helpless and in pain on the sand, abandoned by half of his soul, for the first time in his long life Michael's terrible rage had turned against himself.

 

He realized then that the orders were a test. He had been meant to refuse, to show judgement and mercy and he had failed to show either. He had failed and it had taken half his soul and his dearest sister beating him broken before he had doubted his actions in even the slightest way.

 

He had been made for war. That was simply fact. They had all been made with a specific purpose in mind. Michael's was as a warrior and general. Raphael's as a healer. Uriel's as the scholar: shepherd of the angels, lover of the human's many creations (even if she seemed to have little enough interest in most humans).

 

Lying in the sun, unable to move, Michael had come to the sudden realization that Gabriel had always had two purposes.

The first, his true one, was to be the speaker, the messenger, the announcer, interested and intrigued not by what Man created but by their thoughts and writings, the long spools of ideas with which they were constructing a world unlike any other.

 

The second was to be Michael's keeper.

 

His poor brother was constantly being distracted from his own calling in order to soothe Michael's intemperate nature. Forever cleaning up Michael's messes, comforting his fears, never a moment's peace from the baby of the family who might slaughter the world if he was left to his own devices.

 

How tiresome it must be for Gabriel, Michael had thought as he'd scorched under the sun, to be joined to one too weak to stand on his own. An incomplete angel who at every turn rather than rising to meet Father's tests instead fell back and let his twin support him. Raphael and Uriel seemed to manage well enough without one constantly needing to swoop in and save the other from distresses of her own making. So it was not a flaw in Father's design but in Michael's own will and actions that lead to these failures. 

 

The boy came back the next day and brought him water. Michael asked if the boy knew who he was helping, and the boy had said yes. When Michael asked why the boy helped him the boy had replied with the simple and complete conviction of the truly just: “Because it is the right thing to do.”

 

Here at last beaten, bloody and broken in the desert Michael finally managed to learn one of Father's lessons.  
  


That night the boy pitched his tent over Michael's body and, though he did not touch Michael, did not offer any balm to the open wounds that still bled sluggishly into the sand, it still felt like benediction, like forgiveness. Mercy.

 

Michale tried the word out on his tongue. It's meaning still felt foreign, but Michael knew as he said it that it ought to have been a part of him from the beginning. War is more than death, it is bravery, sacrifice and mercy. He knew this suddenly, and it made his stomach turn as he looker back at his own actions and the actions of his Father.

 

He has been failing his father not just these last few years but since the very beginning. Perhaps even as he had cast out the Morningstar, he had failed his father by not possessing that trait, by having never learned it in all his long life.

 

The despair he felt was as strong and all consuming as it had ever been. Usually in those moments of sadness, he would call his brother without a thought, seeking comfort as always. That night in the shepherd boy's tent was the first time he resisted the instinct, as old as he was himself, to reach to his brother's essence whenever he was in distress.

 

Of course, Gabriel came anyway. The beat of wings startled the shepherd boy where he sat staring into the fire. The boy had looked at his brother in the doorway of the tent, armed and armoured, and had solemnly nodded. Only then had Gabriel entered. It seemed the boy had a good memory for faces. Or perhaps it was simply difficult to forget a face that had been glimpsed framed by angel's wings.

 

Gabriel had crouched beside him, and lain Michael's head across his lap. He had stroked his little brother's hair as though it was not at his own hand that Michael had suffered these wounds.

 

Michael had looked into his brother's face and known, as surely as he knew his own purpose, that it was not the same for Gabriel as it was for him. Gabriel was half of a whole, and yet still complete in his own self. They were twins, born in the same instant, two halves of a whole, but they were not as those human twins who shared lungs or hearts, despite what Michael had always believed. Their beings were not so entwined as to be inseperable but for death.

 

Michael was Michael, Gabriel was Gabriel, and though they shared a bond and had at their centres a place where their thoughts, feelings and very souls were not their own, they had been made as two and not as one.

 

It was this thought that had unleashed the tears which had been fighting for freedom since Michael had realized the extent to which he had failed his Father.

 

Gabriel had held him and gently wiped them from his face until Michael could weep no more. Then he had a plucked one of his primary flight feathers from his wing and held it over the fire, using the oil to heal Michael's wounds.

 

 

That was when Michael knew what he must do. He needed to build himself into something more like his brother, a half that was also whole. Two separate pieces that could fit together to become one but which could exist without the other.

 

He sees now that in the ensuing years, decades and centuries as he had gathered up all the bits and pieces of himself to paste into a whole he had inadvertently stolen from Gabriel those pieces of his self which had belonged not to him but to his twin.

 

He didn't notice when he began to shut his brother out, he had only been trying to...to be better. To pass the tests and stand alone. To face the darkness without holding his brother's hand.

 

But he had moved so far away from his brother that now he does not understand him at all.

 

Where once it seemed they shared not just a soul but heart and lungs as well, now they were as strangers. Each looked into the face of his twin and saw someone he knew but could not understand.

 

It hurts.

 

It hurts so much, because there is now a gaping would in Michael's soul where a piece of his brother's self used to be. 

 

And now, Father is gone, and it seems things will end as they began.

 

There is Gabriel and soon there will be darkness.

And some days Michael is not sure what frightens him more: that they defeat Gabriel and for the first time Michael must face the light of the world alone, or that they do not and Michael instead must watch everything fall to darkness and decay but at least he will be comforted by the faint flicker of his brother's soul comforting him through their shattered bound.

 

He hopes sometimes, privately, that they will defeat Gabriel and he shall be executed and in the moment that Gabriel is slain, Michael will be struck dead.

 

Because, he is not afraid of the darkness now, but he is afraid of lingering alone after all those he loves have slipped away.

 

_In the end there was Gabriel and there was Michael, and around them darkness was slowly falling._

**Author's Note:**

> Michael seems so profoundly sad to me in the show. Maybe, because of all the angels he seems like the only one who doesn't believe there's specific thing he can do to bring God back? 
> 
> I don't think Gabriel ever calls Michael 'Little Brother' but Uriel does, and I figure among angels they're all so old at this point that anyone being considered 'younger' would have more to do with attitude and personality than age. 
> 
> The story of Michael and Gabriel's creation is directly taken from what Michael says to Gabriel in episode 8. 
> 
> The title is a reference to the bible-verse "Though I walk in the shadow of the valley of death I shall fear no evil, for you art with me Lord", though I've altered it a bit. 
> 
> Also, Michael's insights into his brother are not supposed to necessarily be accurate, he's far from an impartial observer, but even if he no longer understands his brother. 
> 
> Part of me wants to write something like this for Gabriel but, I find it much harder to write his POV.


End file.
